It's Always a Good Time
by How Clever of You
Summary: John needs Stiles to know that he's cool with whoever and whatever Stiles likes, but he's too busy trying to make that clear that he doesn't see what's happening right in front of his face. Stiles/Isaac.


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Between the babble of national news and the general talk around the office, John realizes early on that teenagedom and sexual struggles are one of the most stressful combinations in life. John himself never went through the stage where he questioned who and what he liked, but with the influx of bullying and hate and civil movements, he thinks that it's imperative that his son know that, if he were ever to feel something for another boy, John would be totally fine with it. Really.

They have a sit-down, all-around conversation about this a grand total of two times. The first time was before Karen died – John thinks that maybe Stiles was ten at the time. The three of them had sat down on the couch in the living room and Karen had said, "Stiles, what would you say if I told you that my friends Kelsey and LeAnn loved each other like I love your father?" because she had never been one for beating around the bush. Even then, Stiles had been understanding and somewhat curious, and John was able to steer them clear of any uncomfortable questions.

They have The Sex Talk when Stiles turns thirteen, but they don't have The Other Sex Talk until he's nearly sixteen. Stiles spends the whole conversation with his face in his hands, chanting, "This is not happening, this is not happening, this is not happening," as John points to the demonstrative diagrams in the library book he had so thoughtfully checked out for Stiles. It doesn't dawn on him until later that he could have just _given_ the book to Stiles.

Sometimes, John will try to find ways to slip his question into the conversation. They'll be watching the football game on a rare night that their schedules coincide, and he'll say, "Hey, Cory Crawford's looking good today, isn't he?" Or they'll answer the door to the pimpled pizza delivery guy and when John turns to hand the pizza off to Stiles so he can pay, he wiggles his eyebrows a little bit.

Every time he does this, Stiles just says, "_Dad_," like John is doing something embarrassing instead of accepting that is son is becoming a young man who has needs, possibly the P kind instead of the V kind. It's not like he wants to know the details – he just wants Stiles to know that he's there if he ever needs to talk.

They never talk about Scott. John loves and hates Scott like a second son and he thinks that Stiles feels that they're brothers. Scott was always a lot more vocal about his attractions than Stiles, too. Anyway, as much as John likes Scott, he doesn't think the kid would be able to keep dating Stiles a secret. Really, the kid is an awful liar. He blushes during friendly, M&M poker.

About two weeks after Stiles' sixteenth birthday, they're eating curly fries in John's squad car, when Stiles says, "Dad, I'm bisexual," out of the blue.

"You want to talk about it?" he asks, pretending that he's not dancing on the inside. Not that he wants his son to be gay or anything. It's just the principle that Stiles is open and talking that makes me him so happy. He thinks that a small part of him would have always resented Stiles if his son was exclusively straight because he would probably always feel like something was being hidden from him.

"Nope." Stiles stuffs his mouth full of more curly fries and the subject is dropped.

Even though Stiles is bisexual and John makes it obvious that he's cool with it, the cool dad, the male version of the mom from Mean Girls, but only the part when she offers up contraceptives and not the part where she condones underage drinking, he doesn't talk about boys or bring home any prospects either.

Sure, he hangs out with Scott, but Scott is Scott, and hanging out with Scott means playing Halo and looking at Playboy magazine. John still pops his head in every now and then when all three of them are home at the same time just to make sure that if they're having sex – which they're not, they never are – it's protected.

There's Derek and Ian and Boyd and some guys from the lacrosse team, but Stiles only talks about the first three in an urgent, over-invested sort of way, like he's worried and irritated all at the same time. John never meets them, exactly, and Stiles seems to like it that way.

With Stiles' streak of not liking anyone but Lydia for seventeen years, John doesn't think twice when he starts talking about a kid named Isaac at the dinner table. Of course John knows who he is – the Lahey boy, the one whose dad hit him. Stiles has a particular brand of distaste for this peer and John berates him sometimes because nobody should talk ill of victims. Stiles always grumbles under his breath at this but John never listens to what he says.

It does come as a little bit of a surprise, then, when Isaac starts showing up with Scott to hang out. John thinks he probably opens the door once for Isaac; usually, he gets home when the boys are already there, or leaves before they do. John thinks Isaac is probably a good kid.

Then Isaac begins to appear in the Stilinski household by himself. John thinks it's a good thing for Stiles to finally have a friend other than Scott. He loves Scott, he really does, but after ten years, he's kind of tired of seeing his little bushy head.

John gets home early from work one day to the sound of laughter coming from Stiles' room. He strips off his jacket and locks his gun its case in the living room, then heads upstairs to see what the boys want for dinner. The laughter stops as soon as he starts up the stairs, and when he knocks twice and pushes the door open, he finds Isaac sprawled across the bed with the blankets up to his neck and Stiles lounging crookedly in his desk chair. They're both flushed like maybe they'd just gotten back from lacrosse practice. The thought that Coach Finstock is actually letting Stiles practice again gives John a little thrill because it might mean he'll be put onto the field one of these days.

"Hi, Mr. Stilinski," Isaac says.

"Nice to see you, Isaac." He smiles and glances over at Stiles' gaming TV. He frowns at the blank screen. "I thought you guys were playing something."

"We were!" Stiles is unnaturally red on his cheeks and John takes a nanosecond to fret that maybe he's coming down with something. "The cord accidentally came undone. We were just laughing about it. Right, Isaac?"

"It was really funny," Isaac agrees, smiling. "He was going to the bathroom and tore it out of the wall."

John laughs. "Do you want to stay for dinner, Isaac?"

"Sure, yeah," Isaac says, and John feels a little bit sad because he knows Isaac doesn't have a real place to go home to. Maybe Stiles isn't the only one who's lucky to have found a friend. "Thank you."

"Awesome. I was thinking burgers. What do you say?"

"There's frozen stir fry in the freezer," Stiles counteracts. John puts on his best puppy face, thinking longingly of a juicy bacon burner, but his son is having none of it. He sighs and goes downstairs to make dinner.

John doesn't see Isaac again for nearly a month. That night, there's been another incident at Jungle and he's been sent out to make sure everything's okay. He's patrolling the sidelines of the club, making sure everyone is overage and alright, when he sees Stiles and Isaac stumble out of the crowd and to the bar.

John clears his throat loudly and Stiles stops laughing.

"They're only seventeen," he tells the bartender, who gives the boys a sorry smile and walks away. "How did you two get in here?"

"They didn't ask for ID," Stiles says, and either Stiles is lying or maybe John needs to check on the security out front. "We wanted to hang out with some friends."

"Gay club's the place to go when you don't want to get picked up," Isaac supplies. Stiles elbows him in the ribs.

"Why don't you go wait in the car?" Stiles says through clenched teeth. Isaac's eyebrows jump comically but he obeys. "What are you doing here? Did somebody die?" John frowns at how excited he sounds at the prospect.

"They just asked me to patrol. Good thing I did, too." He gives Stiles a meaningful look and shakes his head. He kind of has to ask, "You meet anyone?"

Stiles gives him a horrified look, his jaw down in what John has always called his Stupid Face. He shakes his head and Stiles' jaw closes with a snap.

"No, Dad, I did not _meet anyone._"

"Does Isaac know?"

Stiles gets this complicated look on his face that makes John think that maybe he's had something to drink. "Isaac, he… yeah? Yeah, I guess he knows."

John nods. "Get on out of here, Stiles. Go home. And don't fall asleep with the TV on again. You're running up the cable bill."

Stiles salutes him and high-tails it out of the club. When John gets home early the next morning, he can hear the TV going in Stiles' room and the quiet snuffling of two sleeping teenage boys.

John must miss something because it goes from Isaac staying over every other night to Stiles sulking in the kitchens, slamming cabinets and muttering to himself.

"Something wrong?" John asks. He finally has a day at home and he's going to kick it off with a nice big mug of coffee. He crosses to their Keurig and boots it up.

"Isaac's just being a dick," Stiles says. He begins cracking eggs into a bowl, but it's much more forceful than necessary. John watches him a bit carefully and can practically see the gears in his head whirring. Finally, he cracks and says in a quiet voice, "I'm scared Scott's replacing me with Isaac. And I'm scared Isaac likes Scott more than he likes me. What if I'm that shitty third wheel friend everyone just wants to leave them alone?"

John takes his coffee and sits down at the table. He props his feet up on the chair next to him. "First of all," he says, "I can tell you that after ten years of friendship, Scott isn't going to replace you the first chance he gets. There is only one person on this green Earth that boy loves more than you, and that's his mom."

"Yeah." Stiles pours the eggs from his bowl onto the pan on the stove and sighs, unconvinced.

"And Isaac is around here all the time. I swear, if he didn't have Melissa to answer to, he'd be living here."

Stiles is turned towards the stove and John can't see his reaction. "You don't think he thinks I'm a loser?"

"I don't think he'd spend half as much time here as he does if he did." John pours some creamer into his cup. "What did he say to make you mad?"

Stiles doesn't answer as he splits the scrambled eggs between two plates. When he sits down, he takes a deep breath. "There's this online roleplaying game and we're... teammates, you know. But sometimes his character goes off and does stuff that's stupid, that not only could hurt our pack, you know, but could also seriously mess him up. I tell him to be more careful but he does it anyway. Then I do the same shit he does and he flips out completely. I know my character isn't as strong or as skilled or whatever as his, but I'm the brains behind all of the operations and I can _do _things. You know?"

John squints at the upper cabinets lining the wall, trying to decide what to say. Eventually, he nods his head and says, "Son, don't waste time arguing about stupid things like that. Your friendship is more important than some game."

Stiles looks frustrated for a minute and John tries to remember what it was like to get mad at his high school friend Pedro, who was the star player of Beacon Hill's rival team. It probably sucked to feel like that in the moment but now, as an adult, John can't think of anything stupider to argue about.

"Sometimes I'm scared he's going to switch to another team," Stiles says quietly. "I don't want to say anything because I don't want him to think I don't trust him, but I'm scared the grass is going to be greener and he's going to decide that I – that our team isn't worth it." Stiles shakes himself visibly and picks up his fork. When he says, "So, who's gonna win tonight? Black Hawks or Red Wings?" his voice is a little bit strained.

John gets the hint though so he says, "Hawks. Don't even get me started on Patrick Kane."

Stiles and Isaac seem to get their differences sorted out because the boy tags along when Scott comes over for movie night. John is miraculously invited to join as well so he whips up three pizzas and lays them out over the coffee table.

The boys take the couch – Isaac, then Stiles, then Scott – and John sits in the recliner on the side. Stiles gets up to pop the movie in, then throws himself back onto the couch, obnoxiously covering Isaac with his body and kicking his feet onto Scott. Both of the other boys laugh, but Isaac blushes bright red, and John wonders how long Isaac has had a crush on his boy.

John falls asleep halfway through the second movie and he only wakes up when Stiles sits back down from putting the fourth movie in. He blinks sleepily at the blue screen and listens to Isaac and Stiles giggle and whisper. He turns his head slightly to fall back asleep when he hears the two of them kiss.

He tries not to alert them that he's awake, lest this be Isaac's big moment, but Stiles laughs and says, "You just can't keep your hands off me, can you?"

"All night, God, I've just wanted" – he cuts himself off with a quiet, quiet groan, and John thinks that maybe it's his signal to leave. He shifts unnecessarily loudly and stretches his arms and legs. Then he sighs and sits up to kick down the footrest.

Isaac is rubbing the back of his neck to hide the blush on his face, but John can see the color on his ears and his arms. Stiles fiddles with the remote, preparing to switch from the menu to the movie. Poor Scott is hunched over against the arm of the couch, mouth open as he snores. He has no idea if they know that he knows but doesn't do anything to acknowledge it.

"I'm off to bed, boys," John says. Now that he looks, he feels stupid for not seeing it. Of course. It had been there all along. "Don't stay up too late."

"No, sir. Night, Dad."

"Have a good night, Mr. Stilinski." Isaac has resurfaced but his face is so red John is a little bit afraid that he's about to burst.

"Night, boys."

Stiles starts laughing before John even reaches the top of the stairs. He hears Stiles go, "You're red as a tomato," and Isaac say, "Shut _up_," before he closes the door to his bedroom. He trusts – hopes is maybe a better word, honestly – that they won't get up to anything on the couch, not with Scott _right there_.

When he gets up in the morning, they're all still downstairs. Scott is curled even tighter around the couch's arm. Stiles is sprawled out on the other side, mouth gaping, his head tilted towards the television (which is back on the menu screen, goddammit Stiles). Isaac is burrowed up against his side, legs so long even slightly bent that his feet are in Scott's lap. John lets himself smile at the tangle of teenage boys until he sees that Isaac has a hand up Stiles' shirt.

Oh, hell no. The two of them have got to have a talk. Maybe a ride around town in the cruiser to give him a little scare. Yeah, that sounds nice.


End file.
